https://bugs.winehq.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45753
--- Comment #9 from Dmitry Timoshkov dmitry@baikal.ru --- (In reply to Josh DuBois from comment #8)
I guess that the same incompatible change would happen during the Windows XP to Windows 7 upgrade.
I imagine you're right, but both the wineprefixes in question were set to XP and I did not change that. Forced upgrades did not come to Windows until Windows 10.
I'm afraid that using Wine implies the continues forced upgrade... Anyway, this needs a retest before throwing even more speculations, and the retest should be done with default Windows 7 configuration.
Is this really what Wine has always done, or what it should do?
It's been always this way. We're just following what Windows does and there are unavoidable incompatible changes. In this particular case there were changes in environment variables.